This blog is intended to hold information about my life to date as well as my career.

I live in a four bedroom semi detached house in Camberley with Nicola Jane Roberts – my “adpoted sister” – and two large white German Shepherds, a reprap, two sheds full of tools, lots of computers and what I like to think of as a real kitchen!

The sheds full of tools are a by product of my ex who would use the excuse of “but I don’t have the right tool” to avoid some of the more physical DIY jobs. After buying at least one of everything, I realised he just would not do it and ended up “doing it myself” Thanks to my upbringing (my grandfather and mum were engineers) I already had the ability and skills.

Since moving from my home town of Sunderland I have worked in the IT sector doing what seem to be semi-random jobs. The first was porting and supporting then developing/enhancing HILO – an ECAD simulator and test generator written in BCPL and (badly) machine translated into C. It was a baptism of fire and taught me so much about a wide range of platforms, compiler technology etc.

I then moved to Cray Research which was a brilliant employer. I developed OSI and email software to meet government compliance targets. This meant doing things on a tight budget.

Then I moved to PIG Limited – now Ingeneering. This is in the process of closure and I left on the 20th of April and I understand why the decision to “get out of IT” was made.

I am currently having the first real holiday in a decade, single after twenty years with Paul and life seems good right now.